mycelium_underground

No worries, I am a fan of pedantry. The amount of involved in the response was just me getting mentally stuck in a washing machine hole.

Most(maybe all) HE washers don't have mechanical flaps that hold back the liquids, they sit in plastic cups that empty by an overflow or auto syphon system when water comes out of a tube located above that tub or cup. It's a fancy plastic cup. Every plastic common to appliance manufacturing is resistant to 5% acetic acid. Chemical resistance of plastics chart

I just looked at the fabric softener cup in my washer, it's HDPE(high density polyethylene). If you look at that chart you will see polyethylene is resistant to even concentrated acetic acid. The plastic bottle the vinigar comes in is made from a lower density polyethylene.

By the time the vinigar leaves the cup is already being diluted by the fill water causing it to overflow or start the auto syphon. It will not damage your washer, but even if it did, you can buy replacements for the entire soap tray for relatively little online. The same can be said for most other appliance parts with the notable exceptions being large motors and some brands control boards. There are tons of write ups, tutorials and videos on how to fix broken appliances and replace parts.

Yeah if you can use just a splash you might have water soft enough to not require anything.

1/2 cup to 1 cup is the sweet spot for my water, 1/4 cup on a very small load.

You definitely don't need that much vinigar. That said most new washing machine are using a chemical resistant silicone or TPE instead of more traditional rubber compound. This eliminated the already miniscule risk of acid damaging the seals.

If you add 3 cups(about 700 mL) of standard 5% acetic acid bleach to 4 gallons of water(~ 15000 mL) you end up with a 0.2% acetic acid you will end up with a pH of something like 5.5 or about the pH of healthy skin. A lot of HE washers will use a 5 gallon initial wash so it's likely to be even gentler than what I came up with in my rough napkin math guesstamate.

Small batches in an old blender. Grated soap mixed with you washing soda, borax or whatever else you are using as a booster. The powders will coat the soap as it gets cut apart and keeping it from clumping back together.

This is hard on a blender so do smaller batches (and don't use a good blender. Get one from goodwill or the like for ~ 10 bucks}. It will also produce very fine airborne power when you open the blender. I promise you that you don't want strong alkaline powers in your lungs, and even if you do it will make the air taste terrible. Do this in a well ventilated place, use PPE, and be careful. I find that after you powder it, the soap in the mixture holds on to the other ingredients and keep them from becoming airborne.

Also use a laundry soap bar, the soap is often stronger so you can use less and it doesn't have ingredients to moisturizer or make the soap easy on the skin. Those often contribute to buildup issues.

I wrote up a big rant with detailed instructions on how to remove residue from washers. A clean washer performed better and it's over of the reasons people get a new washer and it ends up cleaning much better.

EDIT: a link to my washer cleaning and residue removal rant

Yeah when you coat all the fibers of the towel with slightly modified rendered animal fat, then they won't absorb water. The long hydrophobic tail on the tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride molocule really doesn't want to mix with water. It's almost completely insoluble in polar solvents like water.

Why make things soft by addressing the initial problem(residues and hard water salts in deposited in the fibers when the clothes dry) when you can just coat the whole thing in fat and call it "clean" and "soft"

Edited: spelling corrections

Regular laundry detergent leaves residue as well, that's why a lot of washers have self clean cycles.

Vinegar will cut most residues from a washer. It's one of the reasons it works as a softener, it removes detergent residue and minerals from hard water to make your clothes soft. As a side note a lot fabric softeners does the same thing by coating this fibres of the clothes in refined beef fat.

If you want a really clean machine (specific to most HE washers) put half a teaspoon of TSP(trisodium phosphate) in the empty drum of the machine and another half teaspoon where you put your detergent, fill the bleach cup and the fabric softener cup with vinegar. Set the machine to run a pre wash cycle then a heavy duty cycle on the hottest water temp(if there is a hot tap that is after your clothes washer in the pipeline, you can run that tap until it gets hot before starting the washer. HE washers use a lot less water so most of the time they are filling with cold water before the hot water rescues the machine) and as many extra rinses as your machine will allow.

After the TSP removes most of the residue, it's rinsed away and then the bleach cup of vinigar is released with the next rinse cycle. Since TSP is basic and the vinegar is acidic they react and the TSP is neutralized, this may lead to some deposits of various salts(depending on the exact reaction ratio, if there is an excess of vinigar then the acidic solution will help prevent the salts from depositing.

When the fabric softener cup of vinigar is released in the next rinse we ensure that all acidic solution is flushed through the machine. This again will help with any salt deposits and help clean any of the remaining residue that reacts better to the acidic solution.

Any extra rinses after that help make sure that anything that can be washed away will be. Your washer will be very clean inside.

TSP can be purchased at the hardware store for cleaning surfaces before you paint them, just make sure it's actually TSP and not a TSP replacement. Half a teaspoon of TSP in with your dish soap will make you love your dishwasher again. A little goes a long way, and using less TSP is more likely to give you a good result than using more.

That enormous rant aside, I have used homemade laundry soap recipes in several HE machines including two combination washer dryers(where the washing drum is the same as the drying drum, looks like a single HE machine, not a stacked washer and dryer) and in general those machines have more residue problems. I haven't really had any issues. That might be related to the fact that I do not put an excess of soap or detergent into the machine, again often less is more, and if you need better cleaning it's better to do a prewash cycle than add more detergent into the main cycle. More detergent =/= better cleaning, just more residue. Try washing a dish by hand with only liquid dish soap, no water, no damp sponge, just soap and a dry brush or dishcloth. While this is an extreme example, it does help illustrate that detergents or soaps allow grease and grime to be dissolved into water, and that's what allows it to clean effectively, the soap or detergent is just there to get stuff into the water.

Borax sensitivity is a legit concern.

Nope. Fucking spyware bullshit with a hint of Linux is absolutely not king. The fact that the OS allows kernel level anticheat is so stupid that it almost couldn't be anything besides malicious.

When you commit "terrorism" against the fascist enemies of the American people, is not terrorism it's the right thing to do

I can run an LLM on a phone from before the AI craze, it would be slow but it would still run. You can't really make a phone that isn't compatible with AI.

He didn't use the act. He just did it.

That's it, I'm only communicating with people that I can physically slap at the time of communication. Hopefully that buys me at least a decade.